On 12 Apr 2005, at 04:59, Alan Trick wrote:
Hi, I'll sort of try this again, and hope the gods don't mail-bomb us :P.
SVG isn't quite flash, because it's not proprietary technology, but it's not terribly accesible either, because as far as I know, mozzilla is the only browser to have any built-in support for it (adobe has an svg plugin for IE). I guess one of the biggest differences here is that SVG has a future, where as flash is bound to the world of proprietary formats.
Has anyone here actually done any development with SVG?
I have :)
The majority of interest in SVG at the moment comes from the mobile market. SVG Tiny is a required format for all handsets sold on Vodafone (and other carriers) in Europe, as well as a bunch of other places (see svg.org for a list of handsets and links).
On the desktop, SVG is supported natively in Mozilla/Firefox (if you get the right build) and in Opera 8 beta. There's also the Adobe SVG plugin which was bundled with Acrobat Reader for a period. It's been a while since it was released, but Adobe have publicly stated their commitment to SVG, and the next release in particular.
Meanwhile, development on the SVG standard itself is very active. You can see the list of companies involved by looking at the author list in the SVG specification.
It was interesting to see that the major use case for SVG is applications, rather than animations. This probably comes down to the fact that the most popular animation tool outputs SWF/Flash, while programmers are more comfortable (or not uncomfortable) in a more development-oriented environment. Since SVG can be text, all a generator needs is a print statement. On the client side, it's the standard Javascript/DOM environment.
Unfortunately, the majority of interesting use cases for SVG are on company intranets. They choose SVG because they don't want to be locked in to the whims of a single vendor.
As for accessibility, we put a huge amount of effort into this. The SVG format was designed to be accessible, and is more accessible than Flash. The problem is that access tools haven't quite harnessed the power yet (which is understandable since it's tough to make money in that area so they concentrate on the most popular format, HTML).
I'll end the advertisement here.
Dean
-- dean jackson world wide web consortium (w3c) - http://www.w3.org/ graphics - interaction svg specification editor mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
